Unnoticed
by Yamazing
Summary: A quiet story about the quiet life of two people. One, withdrawn into himself because of a rocky past, and one noticing the other. Getting to know him, and noticing more. The story of all the times he noticed something new, all the times he got to know the other a little bit better. All the times he got to know himself better, too. (That would be Alexander and John, respectively.)


**I'm back with Lams! Yay! A couple of things, so that you don't get too confused:  
This is from John's point of view, mostly about Alex.  
In this AU, Alex still had a crappy childhood, but it affected him worse, so that's why he's so quiet. Sorry if that counts as spoilers...  
Yeah, for some reason John isn't friends with Lafayette and Herc, but Alex is. I don't know why either.  
I hope you enjoy!**

* * *

The first thing I noticed about him was how different he looked when he was alone. It wasn't as if it was abnormal for him to be alone, but it wasn't often that I took a moment to look. Considering that his longish, brown hair covered his eyes most of the time, or maybe that he hid under it on purpose, I wasn't surprised I hadn't noticed much about him before. He was quiet, so he'd just blended in until that moment, or maybe I'd noticed how shy he seemed, but even that wasn't really accurate, when I got to know him.

Even if I _had_ talked to him before that moment, though, it wouldn't have been the same. After I noticed him some more, I figured out what was different in class. Whenever he talked to someone, his face took on this extremely afraid and nervous look. No one wanted to be looked at as if they were terrifying, so it made you want to avoid him. But when he wasn't talking to anyone, probably the only time he was actually relaxed, he had a much more open face, if still extremely obscured.

I caught a lucky moment when I saw his face, it turned out. Since he normally kept his head down, literally, and covered his eyes with his hair, seeing his face really was rare. One day, I was walking home with a friend, and as we walked past the buses in a comfortable silence, I looked around. I enjoyed people watching, and considering how many people there were walking around like us, it was prime time to do so. I looked up at the bus windows just as one opened. Since my eyes were drawn to the motion, I looked a little longer than I might've otherwise. It wasn't any amazingly long time, but it was long enough for me to see his face, for once completely exposed.

I was surprised, to say the least. Not because his face was particularly spectacular, in either a good or bad way, but just because I recognized him enough to know who he was, and to see how different he looked.

Just like it always seems to happen when you first learn a word, I started noticing him again and again. It turned out that, when he wasn't talking to anyone, his expression was always the same. Controlled indifference. It give the impression that he didn't care about you or anything else, which was weird, considering how he acted in class. It was definitely an improvement from his talking face, though.

The next thing I noticed about him was how he was constantly watching everything. Maybe I just caught rare moments, but it always seemed like he was noticing things that no one else was. Since I was noticing him, I noticed them too. It was cool to feel kind of like a detective. Once, in a class with him, we were researching various things on computers, and someone's books were pushed off of their desk by someone walking by just enough that they seemed unbalanced, and kind of teetered. As sometimes happens with unbalanced things, the books soon started their slow tip towards falling. As far as I could tell, no one noticed except for me and, obviously, him, because next thing I knew, he reached over and pushed the books back onto the desk in one fluid motion, and promptly went back to work as if nothing had happened.

It was kind of amazing.

A little bit after that, I noticed that when I willingly talked to him, instead of getting the scared look, he started to blush lightly and responded quietly, all while making minimal eye contact and hiding behind his hair. It made me want to talk to him more, and to see how many different faced he made. Already, I'd found out three.

"Hey." I had decided to start out simple.

He looked around lazily, clearly not aware I was talking to him. That, or he was just ignoring me really well. I hoped it was the former.

"Hey, Alexander."

That definitely got his attention. He practically flinched just at hearing his name. There wasn't anyone else named Alexander in our class either, so he couldn't pretend it was that.

He slowly turned around toward the source of the sound, and saw me. I don't think that I was what he was expecting because his controlled expression broke for a moment, and he seemed supremely relieved. Then, realizing what he'd done, he started to blush.

He seemed to have forgotten that I said hello, so I tried once more.

"Hi?"

This seemed to work, and he opened his eyes a little bit wider, before nodding his head briefly and turning back to his computer, still blushing.

I felt kind of weird trying to befriend him mostly out of curiosity, but I figured that it was as good a reason as any. It wasn't as if I planned to stop interacting with him once I figured him out or anything. Plus, I was liking him more the longer I talked to him, and the more I learned about him.

I learned that he was a very closed person, at least at first and in public. It was pretty obvious before, but it was even more obvious when I talked to him more. I wondered if he had any friends, considering how hard it was to get any kind of response, much less something to build a relationship off of.

I talked to him again, and this time he said maybe two words. Two more than last time, anyways.

"Hello," I started. At this point, I must've seemed kind of creepy to him, but I tried to look as normal as I could. I'm sure it wasn't much.

This time, he _must_ have been intentionally ignoring me. I decided, against what I knew was probably smartest, to try again.

"Alexander?"

He turned to me then, quickly, and I knew he'd heard me when I first said hello.

"Alex, please," he said, looking a little bit paranoid or something like it, and then turning away from me again.

I noticed that his voice was a little higher that normal, and I determined that must be what happened when he was actually nervous. I got the feeling that he wasn't nervous talking to other people as much as just scared.

If him being nervous wasn't progress, I don't know what could've been.

I tried again- of course I did. Many times. After a while, it began to seem like a sort of thing that we did. Our thing, to me at least.

So, I continued. I made slow progress, but it was still progress. After a couple of weeks of consistently greeting him, I tried to up the ante.

"Hey, Alex." He nodded to me, as had become normal. Then, I daringly said, "How are you?"

Okay, so maybe it wasn't much, but it was a lot more than either of us had been doing up until that point.

After I asked, he stared at me blankly for a couple of seconds. Then, he turned back to his computer as if I'd said nothing. I immediately decided that I'd try again tomorrow.

As we both got up at the end of class, I noticed him looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

"I'm good," he finally said, catching me off guard. He didn't ask about me, but I had the feeling he would.

Later, after amassing experiences, I learned what his blank stares meant.

Eventually, when I had finally firmly made up my mind to ask him if he wanted to come over to my house (which shouldn't have been as hard as it was) I got up the nerve in English and just asked him. He stared at me blankly for a long time, again. A very long time. So long that I felt the need to take my invitation back, and did, scared that I'd just ruined the past three months of me extending friendship. I'd even been starting to get a response!

"Sorry," I started, hoping I could fix my mess up, "I just thought… well, I'm not sure what I thought. But anyways, you don't have to come." I smiled, trying to make it more convincing, mostly for my own benefit.

But then something weird happened. It was like a switch flipped in him, throwing him into motion. He spluttered for a moment before going completely silent.

After he composed himself, he said three tentative words, ones that I liked to imagine he might've been trying to choose carefully since I asked him.

"I'd," he halted, furrowing his eyebrows a tiny bit, and then putting his mask back up, "like that."

He only let out a shy smile after that, but I found myself grinning widely enough for us both.

His blank stares meant he didn't know what to say. I found myself strangely proud that I managed to make him speechless so often, although maybe I shouldn't've been.

* * *

When he came over to my house, I found out a lot. Not just the first time, either. Most of the time he was there, we talked, and when we weren't doing that, we listened to music and played simple video games. Most of them were from when I was younger, and they always relaxed me when I played them with friends. He seemed fine with playing them, too, so we went ahead and did so. Even so, I found that after a certain amount of playing, one of us always brought up something we wanted to talk about, and we'd start talking. Eventually, we'd end up sitting on the couch, the video game paused, talking away.

Since we were still getting to know each other, the words flowed freely. We both wanted to get to know the other better. Strangely enough, Alex's flowed even more than mine. He was really quite talkative, actually.

It turned out that when he wanted to saw something and wasn't in danger of being heard by anyone he didn't know or like, he just said it.

It turned out that he wasn't at all averse to conflict. He managed to start some small arguments about small topics, even though we thought the same thing most of the time.

It also turned out he wasn't very comfortable talking about his past. I didn't pressure him at all, because I was still trying to feel out how much I could talk about without making him hate me. Still, I got the impression he hadn't had the best childhood.

Wanting to know more about him and his past and present life, settling on just the present though, I learned that he _did_ have friends. Two close ones, Lafayette and Hercules, who he introduced me to within a week of coming to my house. They were nice, and also very overprotective. It took me a while to really feel like I'd won them over, but I liked their overprotectiveness. I wanted to protect him too.

In fact, as I talked to him, it turned out that he really wasn't shy at all. As far as I knew, that was just something that he was like at school. Later I'd learn why he came off as so, and I already had a suspicion it had something to do with his past, but at that moment, I just learned that he could be quite loud. Not in public usually, but loud in his opinions, actions, and voice in private all the time. He definitely had opinions, too. I found myself agreeing most of the time, and when I didn't, at the very least I learned about him and about the world. I learned because he didn't just _have_ opinions- he researched, he wrote, and he knew what he was talking about.

That's another thing I learned- he wrote. Not fiction, I didn't think, when I noticed it first in English. I could tell that after he finished everything he had to do in English, early of course, he would secretly open other documents and just write away. I was almost surprised that no one else noticed, what with the insistent and constant clacking of his keys. I guess most people were too busy in their own worlds. But at my house, I learned how much he loved writing, and also just how much he wrote. He said that he probably spent about three hours a day, if not much more, writing.

When he left, I spent the next three hours laying in bed, just processing what'd happened, and thinking of all I'd learned. There was more than I could remember, really.

* * *

I was going on with life, noticing things about him as usual, when I noticed something new about _me._ It was very strange. Throughout the whole endeavor, everything had been simply about him. Now, I had to add myself into the equation.

It was a strange thing to have to do- to remember myself.

Next, I remembered that I had to add his friends to the equation. It was a little bit scary, to find out how much of my time, energy, and focus had gone to observing him alone. I thought that maybe I should stop spending so much time with him, but it seemed like a kind of waste to have gone so far and then to quit. Plus, if I was honest with myself, I didn't want to stop. I liked being with him, liked learning about him, too much.

So I just figured that I'd have to find a way to make sure it was a good thing, a constructive thing.

At this point, he'd started returning my greetings in class, and we had started hanging out relatively often. We'd go downtown sometimes, but more often than not, we'd go to my house and just talk. We rarely ever ran out of things to talk about, and if we did, the silence always managed to be comfortable. When we got into arguments, we had a good way of debating for awhile, presenting facts and trying to argue our sides. Eventually, we'd either agree to disagree, or one of us would grudgingly admit that the other's point had some validity. The best cases were when we both ended up considering the other's side. Then, we could team up to find out which option was right, if either, instead of arguing about it.

If I thought about it, it was already a mutual relationship, and I was most definitely benefiting from it. My only concern was whether or not I was keeping a healthy balance between him and everything else in my life.

I didn't think I was.

Suddenly, one day, I realized something while I was reading a book. In it, there were two people who were good friends. I thought about me and Alex while I read, but there was a startling lack of similarities between them and us. They were much more casual about the whole thing, and they didn't seem to spend long amounts of time talking. In fact, they seemed to know each other only relatively well, instead making up by hanging out often.

Then, there was the romantic interest of one of them.

Now them… The similarities were eerie.

It made me distinctly uncomfortable.

Then I an epiphany moment. _The_ epiphany moment.

I liked him.

I wasn't so much mad about it, instead mostly scared and confused. As I thought about it even longer, the confusion faded a little bit. The symptoms were obvious, in hindsight.

I spent the next two months struggling with this in my head. I wasn't completely new to dating or anything, but everything about Alex was different. Plus, I had something already built with him that I didn't want to ruin. I hadn't ever had that before. Losing it really did scare me.

I was tempted to ask someone about it, because it had started to weigh heavily on me, constantly. I didn't know who, though, and I doubted that I would be comfortable confiding in anyone about something so personal, even if I had someone in mind. I ended up, instead, laying in bed every night, remembering everything that had happened. I tried to imagine how Alex would react if I told him.

Then I remembered that simulating the future doesn't actually work, and thought about everything that had happened some more. Finally, I realized something about myself.

I was a forward person. A blunt person. Not the type to hang back or wait.

Really, think about it. I spent weeks trying to get someone to acknowledge me, for no reason other than curiosity. It wasn't easy, and I felt awkward most of the time, but I still did it, because I wanted to. I spent _weeks_ saying greeting a stranger, with almost no response.

Clearly, I was a forward person.

That made the decision much easier. After all, I had to stay true to myself. I always did.

* * *

"Hey, Alex?"

I was really nervous. I had finally made up my mind that today was the day to confess, and now I was facing the consequences. But as Alex turned around to face me in response, some of my doubt went away.

I spent a moment, just looking at his face. I noticed how plain brown eyes could look so beautiful. I'd never thought so about anyone before.

When he raised his eyebrows in a question, I took a deep breath, the doubt slowly seeping back in.

"Well, uh, I," I stopped, taking a steadying breath. "I think that I like you."

We were in a public place, so he just looked at me confusedly.

"That is, I think I like you romantically." I paused. "Yeah."

I looked down, embarrassed at myself, and braced myself for whatever terrible thing was inevitably coming.

No one noticed except for us, but the best thing I learned, right after I looked down, unaware of what was coming, was how warm and full of possibilities his hands were, as he smiled- broadly, for once- and took hold of mine.


End file.
